Hunting for greenbacks

By John Sutcliffe COLORADO VOICES

McELMO CANYON – Let’s establish a couple things at the outset:
First, I love to hunt, and second, the abundance of game is one of
the reasons I live in southwest Colorado. However, has my urge to
hunt been tested lately? You bet it has.

Two days before the first rifle season begins in October, a
cavalcade of vehicles, towing vehicles, toting vehicles descends
on Cortez. Each serpentine command post, packed, stacked and
swathed in camouflage netting, their flatbeds a colorful pile of
meat coolers, their four-wheelers replete with protective
scabbards, mounted ammo boxes and swiveling rifle rests, crawls
menacingly into town. And from these steel caravans stumble aging
mountain men, stiff from the heated seats of their $40,000
pickups. Concealed, like Macbeth’s enemies, in their own advancing
Dunsinane, this force masses for its assault on our vaunted
wildlife. Slaughter is in the wind. And we, like saloon girls at
the end of the Chisholm trail, prepare ourselves for them and their money.

“Welcome Hunters” signs, furnished by beer companies, hang on
every wall, fill every shop window, flutter over every gas station
and frame every motel entrance. One pawn-shop-cum-liquor-store,
dwarfed by a giant, homemade “Welcome Hunters” sign, offers the
hunter, poor or prosperous, everything he might need. To those
with a couple of bucks, they offer: “Guns, Discount Prices,” “Ammo
on Sale,” “Beer, Wine and Liquor”; for the less well-heeled, “Cash
for Pawn.”

In a feeble attempt to justify this collective
obsequiousness, the local papers roll out their annual article on
how valuable this injection of cash is for our feeble, faltering
local economy, never listing the beneficiaries by trade, although
the plethora of “Welcome Hunters” signs girdling every liquor
store provides some indication of whom they might be.

But what of the people in charge of hunting, the Department
of Wildlife, what are they up to? One thing is a survey they
conduct amongst hunters once the season is over. When I was
called, a tired voice on the phone began like this.

“Would you describe your hunting experience this year as: Very
Satisfactory, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory or Very
Unsatisfactory?”

I chose “Unsatisfactory,” hoping my
dissatisfaction might encourage the interviewer to question me
further. No such luck, he simply moved swiftly on to the next
question with its list of available answers. I interrupted,
insisting we discuss my answer, only to be met by the
interviewer’s equally forceful insistence that he could not stray
from the options on his questionnaire. I spluttered something
about owning land and various committees I was on, but by then we
were on to question three.

Another DOW strategy is to set “harvest goals” for big game
as the basis for the number of licenses to sell. Of late they have
mysteriously identified an explosion in the elk population,
permitting them to sell far more licenses. How convenient that
this coincides with a drop in income from deer licenses, the
population having been managed into dramatic decline. Could not be
simpler, the shortfall in revenues, from fewer deer tags, made up
by selling a lot more elk tags.

Unfortunately, once you have depleted the elk in similar
fashion, what is left?

Quality hunting is what we want. Bucks and bulls who have
walked this earth a while, not just rag-horns that are killed the
moment they are legal, or spike bucks that might still be nursing.

On the final day of the third season a couple of years ago,
we were behind the dam at McPhee Reservoir with a bunch of other
hunters. From the bench we watched a long line of exhausted elk
plod up the steep slope on the other side of the creek, their only
cover some jack oaks. One hundred rifle sights searched for a
legal bull. Below us, trucks cruised the road, their many
occupants searching the herd for the four points the law requires.

Eventually a legal bull was spotted and shots rang out. Down he
went, hunters began a rush towards him to claim the kill. It was
disgusting. The elk were exhausted from being hunted for three
months almost continuously, if you include the bow season. How can
it make sense to chase them for one-quarter of their lives?

We need an independent survey of our herds by people who will
not benefit from exaggerating the size or quality of them. And let
us find out why all the neighboring states operate a draw for
out-of-state hunters. As to the whine about how much revenue is
generated by this boorish invasion, we should answer: Not for much
longer if we decimate the elk as swiftly as we did the mule deer,
chasing cash flow.

Revenue driven, what a dreadful way to describe our game
management.

John Sutcliffe farms hay and wine grapes 12 miles from the Utah
line.

Where they will stay?

Don Eberle COLORADO VOICES Denver

I would see them come in the evening, for the evening is when
one must find a bed for the night. Evening is when the fights with
parents would happen or conflicts at another facility would arise
and there was nowhere else that could take the children.

Only they weren’t really children; not in the sense
we now think of children. The ones I have seen are caught in an
in-between time: too old to be children, too young to be adults.

I would see them arriving quietly. Sometimes a police
car would pull up at the sidewalk, a young girl emerging from the
back seat, hands manacled behind her. Sometimes it looked like the
handcuffs would slip right off, her arms were so thin.

They came to this emergency shelter for girls, housed
in a small, square building sitting between the old Victorian
houses on our street. It was there years ago when we moved into
our own office.

For this is a mixed neighborhood close to downtown.
Homes wedged between offices. Older apartment buildings that are
now dwarfed by new, upscale condominiums. The growth and new
neighbors are welcome. I wonder if they would welcome this shelter
if it was the other way around.

But that’s not the question, for they are closing it.
Not because there isn’t a need for such a place, but because those
who run it wish it wasn’t so.

The way it is just isn’t working, they say. Now the
needs of the youth are greater and more complex and it is
important to treat their problems in a different way. It is
important to keep the children in their homes with their families,
if you can.

For once children reach the streets, the problems
become more difficult to solve. Indeed, the face of homeless youth
has changed over the years. Before, it was a shock just to
understand there were children living on the streets, as invisible
as they were to us.

Ten years ago, the problem was youth on the run from
their families. Ten years ago, you could find some willing member
of the family or a friend to take the youth into a safe, sheltered
home. Today, only 10 percent can find their way back to such a
place.

Now it is hard to find the families, if the families
aren’t on the street themselves. Or to find a family that does not
have severe problems of its own.

Ten years ago, only a handful of children on the
street were mentally ill. Now 50 percent of them need medical
attention for a severe mental health problem. It is harder to find
the help, harder to meet the needs.

The people who work with them will tell you that the
culture of the street is hard to change. Yet in the face of this,
Colorado’s residential treatment centers are closing and shelters
that serve youth have been overburdened. At one homeless youth
shelter in Denver, more than 60 percent of the children served
have been in “the care and custody” of our departments of social
services.

Yet there is no place in the state budget that has
money specifically designated for homeless youth. Even in these
times of projected budget surpluses, they say there just is not
enough money. It is not easy to care for these youth, so the files
are closed, the case workers move on, and the state leaves it to
others to work with them.

Or they are left to the streets.

It is getting dark now. I don’t see any lights on at
the shelter. The children are out there. You can see them if you
look for them. At the state Capitol, in the malls, downtown. They
are finding a place to stay for the night, with or without our help.

But without our help, the street is where they’ll stay.

Don Eberle (doneberle@envisionet.net), a Denver attorney and
former state legislator, hopes to be a lifelong resident of
Colorado.

It’s all about Conner

Tom Preble COLORADO VOICES Peyton

I apply sunscreen. Another day out in the sun driving little
kids and adolescents awaits me.

Among other things, I am a
rural school bus driver. Bus drivers must pass a Colorado Bureau
of Investigation criminal background check, driving record check,
earn a commercial driver’s license and pass many additional tests.
No, it’s not really a community service punishment for
child-averse criminals, as one might imagine.

The children
give me daily gifts unawares. There’s the little tyke who’s so
excited to get on the bus that he tries to squeeze through his
ranch pipe gate. He’s forgotten he has a backpack on. Firmly
wedged, he flails his arms and legs about like a stuck turtle. Dad
gets out of the car and pries him free. Then there’s the small boy
whose dog is so glad to see him in the afternoon that the big
canine just bowls the little guy over, a la Fred Flintstone and
Dino. Or how about the little girl who sings me the song she
learned in choir? I sing along with her if I know the words.

Another girl sits behind me and has me help her with her
arithmetic. Using the Socratic method, I ask pointed questions
that help her figure out the answers for herself. Then there are
the many dogs that would dearly like to come along. Those heeler
dogs are smart. They’d probably do well.

I
like the kids and they know it. At the end of the day I drop them
at their homes. The burgeoning evening is gorgeous. A showy orange
and purple sunset plays behind Pikes Peak, 30 miles to the west.

As I let the kids off in ones, twos and small groups, the noise
level drops in the bus. At last the remaining group of chattering
children piles off. In the mirror, barely visible above the seat
backs, I see the top of one child’s head. “Conner, you with me?” I
ask. About 7 years old, Conner will be the last little guy to
deliver. The arched bus ceiling seems cathedral-like in comparison
to his small, lonely self. “Waddaya say we take you home?”

“OK!” is his
enthusiastic but small-voiced reply.

Driving on
with miles to go, it’s just the two of us in the cavernous, rattly
bus. At the head of a comet’s tail of dust, our bus is a yellow
speck jouncing over a wide, lonesome prairie. After a bit,
Conner’s head disappears below the seat backs. “Sleeping,” I
think, smiling to myself. School days are long for one so young,
and so I find I’m driving with extra care, as if hauling nitro.

At last
Conner’s family’s place appears down the long gravel road.
Winter’s sun has set behind the mountain now. I creep slowly to a
stop. The last stop, Conner’s driveway. “PFFFF!” Setting the air
brake doesn’t wake him. The diesel engine growls, idling, waiting.
“Conner,” I call in a soft dad’s voice, “you’re home .”

The top of
a little tow head reappears. I wait. Rubbing his eyes, half awake,
he shuffles down the aisle. At the front he pauses and turns
toward me in silence. Sleepy-eyed, with arms outstretched,
lunchbox dangling in one hand, he reaches without a word and hugs
me as I sit belted in the driver’s seat. Then he silently turns to
go down the steps. “Good night Conner,” I say softly.

Between surprise and affection, satisfaction
spreads within like a hot drink on a cold day. Not a glamorous
job, driving a school bus. Not the kind of thing that would
impress people at a party . “So, what do you do?” But an important
job nonetheless. Important to be done perfectly every day, every
gear shift, every stop. I realize that my eyes and smile must warm
the kids more than any rattly old bus heater could. Suddenly
Conner has made all the rolling “monkey house on wheels”
pandemonium OK. Just a humble job charged with trust. Oddly, I
actually feel better about the job for its anonymity – and its
assumptions about me. A little bit of the old-fashioned America
remains.

I watch Conner with his
short 7-year-old’s gait as he shambles off down his long dirt
driveway. He’s flanked by two very happy, bounding muttly dogs. I
pause to watch him because I have to. My eyes are moist and
stinging. Darn that sunscreen.

Tom Preble (lvranch@worldnet.att.net) is a dad, generalist and
freelance writer living in metro Peyton, Colo

Not your typical 4-H mother

Kate Krautkramer COLORADO VOICES Yampa

So far I have survived six years as a vegetarian in a cow town.
It’s not easy to hide in a community of 300 people. I think my
husband and I have gained a sort of legendary status for not
blowing away or dying of malnutrition. “Whadda you eat, then?”
This from a 10-year-old at the rural elementary school where I
work.

I straighten myself up, try to look composed, look around to see
who’s listening. “Well, pastas.” I start my list.

“You mean macaroni?” The kid interrupts me and looks down at his
bologna sandwich with a kind of sad love in his eyes. “Every
single day?” He feels for me in my depravity, but I clearly exist
outside the realm of what is culturally permissible. “Gross,” he
says, and I can see mayonnaise ooze between his teeth. I tell him
he shouldn’t talk with his mouth full and leave to have my own
lunch in the teachers’ lounge.

My co-workers and neighbors are ranchers. Calving season is marked
by fellow teachers dragging into school, their eyes with the
spacious look of somnambulates. I ask them questions like, “How
many last night?” and “Did you have to pull any?” The answers
vary according to the size of the ranch, of course, and the time of
the year. It may be that there were no new calves, but my friends
were out all night anyway, lifting tails, just checking.

When the days finally lengthen and the blackbirds return with their
insistent haranguing, my husband starts teasing me about “Baby
Animal Season.” I start waiting for the calves. My anticipation
was particularly acute the two years I was pregnant myself. I’d
stop and chat with the cows and heifers. “Can’t be long now,
Mama,” I’d say to them, trudging into what snow was left to lean
over the fence so they’d hear me.

On my regular walking route there are two pastures directly
opposite one another. As soon as the first calf appears, I make a
point of going each day, counting the new arrivals on each side of
the road until there are too many to keep track of. The black-faced
calves are my favorites, teetering where they stand, blinking with
eyelashes like little brooms.

In truth, I am far more fascinated by the cycles of life than I am
upset by the killing of animals. I became a vegetarian as a
concerned and impressionable teenager when someone told me it takes
10 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Given the scenario of
a starving world population, I made a pact with myself not to eat
meat for an entire month. Twenty-two years later, I still have no
desire to eat meat.

“But I love the cattle,” I tell a friend over lunch. “The way
they look standing out in the fields and everything.” She’s asking
me questions and eyeing my spring rolls and peanut sauce. “And I
want my kids to be in 4-H when they get older, and I always go to
the county fair.” I know I sound like an idiot to her, but I feel
like I am doing my duty, contributing to the diversity of my
community. Maybe I should also tell her that my husband owns a
Harley and I know a little about yoga.

A few weeks later, another friend told me she heard her husband
talking to his buddy, who was going to sell us a used truck. The
guy had called for a reference. “Yeah, yeah, you can trust ’em,
they’ll pay ya. They’re real nice people,” my friend’s husband
told him. “Vegetarians and all, but real nice just the same.”

The next day I was sure to wear my cowboy boots to school. I
clicked my heels on the tile floor, brandishing a lunchbox full of
eggplant parmesan.

If I’m destined to play an outlaw, I thought, at least I’ve got the
costume for the part.

Kate Krautkramer (jakk@cmn.net) is an essayist and teacher.

We know each other

Melanie Boock COLORADO VOICES Minturn

You know me.

I am that snowboarder punk standing next to you, with my pants
slipping off my hips, dragging the ragged hems in the snow. When I
ask if you have the time, the flash of silver through my tongue
catches the sun like a minnow.

You run over my snowboard with your skis as you grumble, “Get a
life.” That’s me, the one with the dinged helmet and the duct tape
wrapped over what used to be my gloves.

You know me, all right.

I am the one in the blue scrubs with the sweat stains, the one who
has not eaten all day. I am the nurse waiting for you as the ski
patrol drags your broken body down the mountain into the Emergency
Department. I am the one who removes your ski boots, your expensive
snowsuit, your four and five layers of damp cotton, your denim if
you are Texan, and your stinky, sweaty socks, without the use of
scissors. I’m the one who reminds you who you are, where you are,
and how you got there, until the cloudiness of your concussion
finally starts to clear.

We find a place for you, ice for your knee, a warm blanket, a
stretcher in the hallway, and if you are really lucky, a pillow.
There are now 21 patients in this emergency room built to hold 14.
Your knee injury is identical to every one of several hundred we
will see this season, but we do our best to remember it is the only
one that matters to you.

I am that snowboarder, listening to PJ Harvey’s “Kamikaze” as I
hike the half-pipe. I’m the one with the wrist guards that my watch
does not fit under. It is hard to start an IV or do chest
compressions with a cast on your arm.

I am the one who discharged 360 joules into your father’s chest and
got his heart started again. I am the one who made you stay in the
warm, safe ER all night when you partied too hard and were found by
a bus driver, passed out drunk in a snowbank. I am the one you
argued with when you were strapped down to a hard backboard and
could not move. I am the one who would not allow you to walk around
and let vertebral bone shards sever your spinal cord for good.
Boy, were you ever mad at me then.

One of my favorite patients was an elderly man, an extraordinary
former professor. He used to know Einstein. He made us laugh and he
explained what critical mass is in a way that made sense. He could
watch people descend the mountain from his room as he fought for
his life in the ICU.

He said Einstein looked just like a snowboarder.

I know you: You’re the skier who had heart bypass surgery in
Tucson. You sit next to me on Vail’s Northwoods chairlift and
complain bitterly about your nurses. You say they almost killed
you. You suggest that because of my line of work, I am clearly
negligent, unintelligent and responsible for your suffering. It is
attitudes like yours that make nurses quit, leaving even fewer to
care for you in the future.

I work grueling 12-hour shifts trying to put broken bodies back
together, ease pain, counsel fears and console what cannot be
fixed. It’s not that I don’t want you here; on the contrary, my
survival depends on your coming to ski on this mountain.

Besides, it makes me happy to see you having fun.

As for me? I am that snowboarder who is just like you, trying to
relax and blow off a little steam. I’m the one you saw cheering at
the X-Games last weekend in Aspen, standing next to the guy with
the Mohawk in the rowdy crowd of hooligans.

When I’m riding, I’m trying to think of anything but the face of
the drowned ice fisherman whose fixed and dilated pupils will never
again constrict in morning sunlight shining on a frozen lake. I’m
trying to think of anything but the young boy who hit a tree and
never woke up, or the baby who died for no reason at all.

Next time I see you and ask for the time, and you start to tell me
to “get a life, punk,” think about it.

The life I save might just be your own.

Melanie Boock (melanie@boock.com) is a nurse who lives in Minturn.

Depression glass

Marjorie Bruce COLORADO VOICES Colorado Springs

By sheer chance, I spotted a notice in a local newspaper about the
National Dealers of Depression Glass holding a show off of
Interstate 25. Admission was $4.

It is hard for me to believe that this ugly stuff has gone from
tacky to treasured in my lifetime. We few who were young then (the
word “teenager” was made up by advertisers sometime in the ’40s)
are now the rapidly disappearing remnants of the Great Depression.

Honestly, I make every effort not to talk about the good old days,
unless I am among peers. But once in a while, I find an
irresistible springboard and the whole panorama instantly unfolds
itself like the creases in a concertina.

Any mention or sight of Depression glass makes me “harrumph!” We
bought it at Woolworths – at a cost of possibly $3 for a service
for four. It had no beauty whatsoever, but a Depression bride was
glad to get anything that matched.

The crash in 1929 (when I was 12) was in its way a kind of
historical turning point – somewhat as we proclaim Sept. 11 to be –
not in loss of life, but in the decreased ability to sustain life.
I wonder what items besides glass are collected with the word
“Depression” affixed to them?

Buttons? We had lovely buttons, the likes of which one doesn’t see
now. When the Depression was over, my father began collecting
buttons. His grandsons now proudly display them – framed according
to species, and the collection is now very valuable.

“Why don’t you have them appraised?” I ask.

Blank stares. “What for?” they respond. “They’re never going to
be sold!”

Maybe that’s part of the Depression glass craze. It brings me a
tiny bit closer to understanding, but not much. (After all, Dad’s
buttons are beautiful; Woolworths’ glass was not.)

I don’t suppose anyone is interested in saving old wringer-type
washing machines. They were period pieces, too; so were old ice
boxes serviced by the ice man. Ours held a 50-pound cube.

Neighborhood waifs followed the ice truck and picked up the shards
to suck.

I don’t recall ever feeling deprived as a child. Feeling poor and
being poor are very different things. For Christmas, my brother and
I got new underwear, flannel pajamas, one toy and one book. In our
stockings, we got an orange and some Brazil nuts.

Our father held that presents were for children, but we gave our
aunt (who raised us after mamma died) a box of cherry chocolates –
after we had each sampled one to see if they were good enough for
her.

For recreation, we took brown bag lunches and walked 10 blocks to
the beach, where we met our friends and took turns peeling each
other’s sunburns. No lifeguards, no restrooms. God didn’t mind if
you peed in his pool!

Luckily, I wore a “middy” – a loose blouse with a sailor collar –
and a skirt all through junior and senior high. Two good navy wool
pleated skirts and six middies got me through six years. My dad
thought that was a great economic blessing. I have never outgrown
my belief that uniform school dress is a great thing, but the
people who market endless things will move heaven and Earth to
block it.

The Gazette in Colorado Springs is starting a column called “On
the Cheap,” and, in it, solicits the advice of its readers. We
Depressioners can answer that without much fanfare: If you can’t
pay cash, don’t buy it! We had no credit cards, no charge accounts,
just a checking account. Being in debt was a disgrace. My father
thought that going through bankruptcy was a crime approaching
embezzlement.

My aunt prided herself on feeding our familiy well for as little as
possible. We never ate out or ordered in. One month she fed our
family of four on $30. To her, it was a triumph!

We could buy penny candy from proprietors who were patient if it
took us a long time to choose. I always chose a jawbreaker – it was
long-lasting and you could take it out periodically to see what
color it was.

When war came, the Depression ended. During and after that war was
the real boom, into which most people reading this memoir were
born.

There are advantages to being poor early in life. I know a
multimillionaire who still washes his own Bentley – plus a
gas-saving Toyota! He won’t forget the world into which he was
born.

We have, in these times as then, no exact cutoff for who is
“poor,” anymore than we know where “rich” begins. When I was
growing up, “rich” was living in a brick house. There was one in
our small New Mexico town. I used to swoon over it when I was 7.
You could see a grand piano and a grandfather clock through the
living room window and, through the dining room window, a buffet
holding a silver tea service. That was rich!

I have had a grand piano and a silver tea service. I eventually
disposed of them both. I still have as a life’s companion my
grandfather clock with Westminster chimes. The only thing I lack is
a house made of brick. I owe nothing to anyone, so I am not poor. I
have lived a very rich life – and that’s enough.

Time does many things. It heals wounds and softens sorrows. It puts
cracks in sidewalks. It turns small things into big ones – then
periodically makes them small again.

I didn’t save any Depression glass. If I had, I would give it away
now to anyone who likes it – and not charge $4 just to look at it.

Colorado Springs resident Marjorie Bruce (bruce8651@aol.com), 86,
was a teacher of English, drama, journalism and public speaking for
30 years. She now helps corporate executives sharpen their writing
skills.

Dreams die, nature moves on

Tim Fitzgerald COLORADO VOICES Western Colorado

It’s not much to look at: You’d never know the oakbrush and aspen
hillside was once a thriving mining town.

The cemetery isn’t too hard to find. A rusted-out stove in a grove
of aspen rewards the intrepid searcher. The railroad grade is
obvious to anyone, but Mother Nature is doing her best to reclaim
it, too.

At its peak, the town of Marion (and its neighbor, Spring Gulch)
and the surrounding area might have had as many as 4,000
inhabitants. But, like so many mining towns, it is gone today.

It left less trace than many. Marion, at least, had productive
mines and a railroad.

Homesteaders broke ground around the town to feed it. Always an
itinerant bunch, the miners moved on and even the flinty
homesteaders were broken by optimistic agronomy and unrelenting
aridity. The town site itself has reverted to a piece of wild
Colorado, hardly distinguishable from hundreds of other mining
busts and even from unsettled country.

History repeats itself, or so the pundits say. We force our
children to endure lessons in history, often for as long as 12
years. Scarce cranial space is dedicated to command of such sundry
topics as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Battle of Salamis.
Yet even after intensive schooling, I doubt whether most people
have a real understanding of history. History offers an important
perspective to evaluate the impact of our decisions.

Many times I have stumbled across an old homestead, a grave or a
mine abandoned and maybe forgotten in the mountains. Reflecting on
the lost plans and aspirations of the people who lived in those
places is sobering. The optimism and dreams of pioneers must have
been unfathomable, to say nothing of their courage. Each
half-collapsed cabin or tailings pile represents a life spent
chasing a rainbow. What happened to those dreams?

They were swallowed by the maw of the world, and the small scar on
the land has scabbed over.

The mountains here are about 30 million years old; humans have
settled here for perhaps 40,000 years; Western civilization has
occupied it for 150 years or so. Granted, those last 150 have
brought dramatic change. In fact, the past 50 or even 15 have
brought the most drastic change of all.

What is history in this context? A human life seems insignificant
in comparison to these mountains.

I know a man from Mississippi who grew up on a modest cattle ranch.
His father bought the land after World War II and painstakingly
cleared away the southern pine forest for cattle pasture.

There is nothing unusual about this story. The history of New
England two centuries earlier is much the same: The forest was
cleared to make way for agriculture. Today we find that
Mississippi, like Maine or Massachusetts, has been allowed to
return to forest. In the course of one man’s adult life, the land
went from unusable forest to cattle pasture and back to productive
woodland.

With one hand our society has accelerated the pace of land
transformation, while with another we have tried to halt it. Our
state and federal government tries to protect what are perceived as
critical lands for recreation, wildlife and historical value.

I’m always struck by perpetual conservation easements. I’ll be
dead, my children and great-great-grandchildren will be dead, but
so long as the American legal system stands and people still honor
contracts, the land will be preserved.

Forever is a long time.

Reflecting on history, I see the ebb and flow of human endeavor.
The townsite of Marion shows the ebb. Despite our abuse, Mother
Nature manages to persevere. She absorbs the mistakes and heals the
scars. Nature is patient yet persistent and will win out in the
end. We just have to learn from past mistakes and avoid making poor
decisions.

Where I am from

Rashna B. Singh COLORADO VOICES COLUMNIST Colorado Springs

It’s a simple question, but one that I find extremely difficult to
answer: “Where are you from?” They hear an accent they can’t
quite place, although they recognize British tones.
“Where are you from?”

What should I reply? It depends on my mood and how much time I
have. If I’m in a rush, I just say, “Oh, I live here in the
Springs.”

I have lived here for only about eight months. If I have a little
more time, I tell them that I’m from Massachusetts, which feels a
lot more like the truth, if not the entire truth. I lived there for
20 years and attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.

“Massachusetts, eh? Boston?”

I was expecting that.

No, the western part of the state, the part that Boston forgets
even exists. Gov. Mitt Romney famously pronounced that he had
traveled the length of the state from Boston to Worcester, neatly
truncating its western half.

“But where are you really from?”

Now we get to the real question, or rather the unspoken questions:
“Who are you? What are you?”

Not a New Englander – not really, that’s obvious. “India,” I
answer. “I am from India.”

“India?”

They always seem surprised. I don’t fit the stereotype. I am much
lighter complexioned than they expect. My eyes, too, are a lighter
brown than makes sense – not black, for sure, nor almond-shaped.
“India? You speak beautiful English.”

I explain that I have spoken English as early as I have spoken any
other language, that I studied all my life in schools where English
was the medium of instruction and Hindi a required second language.
I tell them that I heard at least three languages around me as I
grew up, and when we moved from one part of India to another, I
heard three more.

If the queue is really long, and we are not going anywhere, the
conversation continues.

“You’re very light – I didn’t know that Indians could be so
light.”

We come in all colors, I explain, from almost white to very black.
It is a multiracial, multireligious, polyglot nation, hard to pin
down, and there is much more to it than the caste system, the
sacred cows, the dot on the forehead and the call centers.

Unlike Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, I don’t need to question my identity,
but I often need to situate it. By nationality, Indian, my
ancestors came to India from Persia more than 1,000 years ago. They
fled to escape forced conversion and to preserve their religious
faith: Zoroastrianism. Legend has it that the leader of the Parsis,
as they became known, demonstrated their intent to blend by
stirring sugar into a glass of milk.

UNESCO recently declared the Parsis a World Heritage Community. My
green card tells me I am a resident alien – no sugar symbolism
there. On the street, people ask me for directions in Spanish. A
Greek pizza shop owner insists I look Greek. Once someone
apologized for wishing me “Happy Easter” because he realized I
must celebrate Passover instead.

I have come to believe that it is not your passport or your
driver’s license that determines who you are, but your sense of
your people and your sense of place. My people are an
ever-expanding and shifting body; natural features, not
nationality, mark my place. In a recent “60 Minutes” show, an
Indian businessman gleefully proclaimed: “Geography is history.”

Not so fast – not for me. Geography gives me my bearings, keeps me
rooted. When I wake up and gaze out at Pikes Peak every morning,
the “sense sublime” that comes over me tells me where and who I
am, as does the indigo light on the low hills of the Holyoke Range
or the cobalt mountains of my childhood.

To borrow again, from Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey,” my
dwelling is no longer demarcated by state lines and national
boundaries, but by “the light of setting suns, and the round ocean
and the living air, and the blue sky.”

Rashna B. Singh (rsingh@adelphia. net) is a professor and author.

If I were the immigration czar

Jose R. Martinez Colorado Voices Columnist, Boulder

Make me immigration czar and I will stop the flow of illegal
immigration to the United States in 18 months, two years tops.

No, I won’t dig a 2,000-mile trench along the Mexican border and I
won’t triple the size of the Border Patrol. I won’t squander
millions of dollars on helicopters and unmanned drones and I won’t
revive Operation Wetback from the 1950s to conduct immigration
raids in the middle of the night.

I won’t sponsor forums on immigration reform that disintegrate into
shouting matches and fisticuffs, as happened recently in Denver.
The July 22 incident at North High School demonstrated that many
people have polarized into red and blue states, crudely for and
against immigration. Their minds are made up, and mountains of data
won’t dissuade them.

But what about the rest of us, the undecided, the target states on
this issue? We’re overwhelmed, confused and frustrated. And we
already know that the presidential candidates and their parties
will not offer any viable ideas on immigration.

We feel a sense of paralysis. Consider a few major contradictions.
Are we a nation of laws or a nation of immigrants – or is that a
flimsy dichotomy? Are the failed economies of a dozen Latin
American countries a root cause and is the U.S. economy addicted to
cheap labor? Does that cause second-hand addiction to cheaper goods
and services? Have we met the enemy and part of the enemy is us?
Then there’s homeland security, the environment and the list goes
on.

Let me share an anecdote that points out the hypocritical and
irrational enforcement policies of the past quarter century. A hot
August day, kids playing in the sprinklers, and an adult says,
“Whoever can stop the flow of water gets an ice cream treat.”

Before you can say “Vicente Fox,” the kids are on the sprinkler
head, with hands, elbows and butts. But no matter what they do, the
water keeps spewing forth. After a few minutes, the wet kids choose
cooperation – since 20 fingertips are better than 10 – but the plan
doesn’t work and they fall to the side, lamenting the lack of
resources. “We need 75 fingertips.”

Suddenly, one girl gets a twinkle in her eye. “I can do it.” She
walks to the side of the house and turns the spigot off.

She later said the fudge sundae was delicious.

Fairly or unfairly, U.S. employers are the spigot of immigration.
As czar, I want full power over employer sanctions and, as in the
war on drugs, I will confiscate all assets associated with
lawbreaking. The fine will be $1 million and 10 years in prison per
transgression.

If a construction job in a congressman’s basement involves two
transgressions, the employer will get a $2 million fine and 20
years in prison. For employers in denial, the agency will check and
verify documents for them, free of charge. In six months, the
agency will own – and will sell to buyers who are willing to obey
immigration laws – thousands of hotels, fast-food franchises,
construction companies, tortilla factories, garment centers,
meatpacking plants, strawberry fields. Early on, the agency will
focus on the 10 million violations currently in place – but,
frankly, we don’t anticipate too many new violations after the
first year.

Immigrants are often uneducated, but they’re not stupid. In their
field of dreams, if there are no jobs, they will not come. If they
don’t come, they will not drown in the Rio Grande and they will not
die of thirst in the Arizona desert. They will not slowly die of
asphyxiation in a railcar in Texas.

We need hard measures now to clear the debris of dishonest
legislation and foolish enforcement. Employers don’t really want to
sit at home at night realizing that the jobs they offer draw
immigrants who might be dying in the desert. Immigrants don’t want
to leave their families in central Mexico and days later die in the
dark in a van crash east of Walsenburg.

We need fair and humane immigration policies that help employers
and immigrants do the right thing. The people in the red and blue
states also want to do the right thing. We all do.

Jose R. Martinez (joseralph@aol.com) taught ethnic studies at the
University of Denver-Colorado for 14 years and has won numerous
awards for his fiction and poetry.

Getting away from it all

Susan Tweit Colorado Voices, Salida

When I was 26 years old, I set out to hike across some of the
wildest territory in the lower 48 states – the Absaroka Mountains
and the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park – accompanied
only by a borrowed German shorthaired Pointer named Sadie.

My marriage had recently shattered, and in short order, I had left
a promising career in field ecology and moved away from the
landscape I loved. My life was a mess.

I packed up Sadie and returned on foot to the mountains I knew
intimately in search of solitude and the balm of silence.

When I am stuck and cannot extricate myself from my problems, I
head for wild country, for someplace removed from the noise and
busyness of humanity.

Seekers of all kinds have retreated to the silence of the wild,
from the solitary treks of the Christian Desert Fathers to Native
American vision quests, Aborigine “walkabouts,” Indian mystics in
Himalayan caves, and rustic church camps.

“True silence,” wrote Quaker William Penn, “is to the spirit
what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” Silence
is where we go to meet our inner selves without distraction, where
we tune out the trivial and focus on what is at the core of our
lives.

It’s not that nature is actually silent. On the contrary, the wild
world is as full of sound as it is of life.

But the sounds of the wild – the whooshing of wind in evergreen
boughs, the haunting calls of sandhill cranes, the rasp of a
grasshopper’s jaws, the click as a seed pod splits open – may
enhance introspection and meditation, perhaps because they sing the
rhythms and cadences of life living itself.

The “silence” of the wild is more like restful quiet, a soothing
absence of the adrenaline-pumping din generated by humanity’s
cellphones, video games, televisions, computers, dishwashers, car
engines, airplanes, jackhammers.

Contemplative silence is an undervalued resource, a rarity in
landscapes dominated by humans. Incessant noise overwhelms mind and
spirit, drowning the small, still voice of our own inner wisdom. In
the constant barrage, it is no wonder that we cannot hear ourselves
think.

When I was 26 and in turmoil, I needed that kind of silence. So I
set off into the wilderness, laden by a towering backpack stuffed
with every conceivable necessity and accompanied by Sadie.

Eight days and 110 miles later, Sadie and I emerged from our trek
dusty and thinner, having forded waist-deep streams, traversed the
Continental Divide, and survived getting much too close to a
grizzly bear.

The long days hiking with only Sadie for company forced me to face
my fears and taught me that no matter where life took me, my
survival depended on heeding my inner voice. Those utterances of
intuition and insight saved Sadie and me more than once.

In the 20-some years since that trip – through marriage and moves
and step-motherhood, through writing and teaching and the
unpredictable progress of life – I’ve often imagined returning.

My imaginations, however, have stayed just that. It’s not only
being unable to find the time, the truth is I no longer have the
physical capacity to make the hike.

When I need the tranquility of the wild, I retreat to a sunny spot
atop a nearby urban stream bank where I can bask in the fragrant
clump of sagebrush my husband and I planted, soothed by the murmur
of the creek.

I miss the solitary days I once spent in wilder places, but I take
heart knowing that others can trek to those landscapes and hear the
stirrings of their souls.

As our homes and neighborhoods grow noisier, we need sanctuaries of
contemplative silence within easy reach, such as the 19,250-acre
proposed Badger Creek wilderness just a few miles downriver from
where I live. We need more easily accessible places where we can
retreat and listen to the stillness without multi-day, 100-mile
treks.

Whether actual wilderness areas or simply bits of urban space
protected from despoilment and din, these reservoirs of wildness
and peace preserve something increasingly rare in today’s world:
the kind of silence that nourishes our hearts and souls.

Susan J. Tweit (sjtweit@salidamillwork.com) is a field ecologist turned author and commentator. She has published eight books.

Our classmates, ourselves

Michael Koenigs Colorado Voices Denver

Those who have experienced the blessings and burdens of single-sex
education feel a certain affinity with one another. When I mention
that the high school I attended is all-male, I get alluring looks
from teenage girls, sneers from teenage boys, and warm smiles from
members of older generations.

However, what once was the prevalent manner of educating youth in
this nation is coming to an end. The stories of Holden Caufield and
Stephen Dedalus will soon serve as only distant reminders of what
once was.

Last fall, during the first week of my senior year at Regis Jesuit
High School, I saw something unprecedented in the school’s 125-year
history: some 350 girls filing into the gym to celebrate an
all-school Mass. I, along with 850 other boys, discovered what my
parents meant when they said girls could be a “distraction” as
our prayerfully bent heads snapped to attention, trying to catch a
glimpse of the phenomenon of Regis girls.

As the well-dressed young ladies took their seats next to squirming
freshman boys, I realized I was witnessing the culmination of a
six-year struggle involving administrators, faculty, alumni,
parents and students to decide whether a girls’ division should be
added to the Regis community.

For the first time in nearly five centuries of educating youth,
Jesuits were offering single-sex education to girls.

Although all 28 Jesuit colleges and more than a quarter of all
Jesuit high schools in the United States are now coed, Regis is the
first to experiment with “co-institutional” education – an
attempt to preserve the separate learning environments for boys and
girls during school hours while encouraging social interaction
after school.

Although this may sound benign, many students and alumni protested
that allowing girls at Regis would undermine the existing
brotherhood – a brotherhood that prided itself on being spirited,
smart and “open to growth” – not, however, open to the idea of
sharing a campus with girls.

The class that graduated last weekend experienced firsthand the
tumultuous transition to co-institutional education. We could hear
teachers’ rhetoric change as the school’s motto, “Men for
Others,” was expanded to “Men and Women for Others.” We could
see a new, $14 million school being erected for the boys and the
existing building undergo a $1 million renovation to accommodate
girls. We could even smell the redeeming aroma of perfume subdue
the odor of boys who had not showered in days.

In Aurora, the Jesuits established a new order even more remarkable
than the new odor. The integrated sports teams (cross-country and
track) and clubs (from Model United Nations to fencing) became
among the most popular activities at Regis almost overnight. The
student sections at football and basketball games overflowed with
the addition of dedicated female fans, and countless young men
began brushing their hair and teeth in an attempt to look like
respectable gentlemen.

Slowly, it dawned on me why the sun is setting on single-sex
education: It’s just not natural in a society where the sexes
mingle freely. Girls did so much to increase the students’
enthusiasm and motivation that I cannot help but think that being
removed from “normalcy” for four years had put Regis students at
a disadvantage. Although we found the brotherhood of Regis, we had
lost touch with the sisterhood of the world.

The changes of the last several years were the first steps toward
providing Regis with a much-needed balance. However, is
co-divisional education the final answer to the question of whether
a school based vaguely on the principle of separate but equal
succeed? After all, the boys who graduate from Regis four years
from now will still not have experienced the intellectual presence
of girls in the classroom. They will never see a girl raise her
hand to answer a question that stumped the rest of the class or
discuss birth control, abortion and other moral issues that
profoundly affect women. They will never watch a girl make a
presentation about the role of women in the French Revolution or
learn her views on religion.

Regis has revised the tradition of single-sex education by trying
to balance the best of both worlds. It has fostered the spiritual,
academic and athletic growth of young men for 125 years and now
hopes to do the same for young women. My own guess is that
co-institutional education will ultimately prove to be an interim
step toward complete co-education – and that this final step for
Regis will not be another 125 years in the making.

Michael Koenigs (mckoenigs@hotmail.com), a May graduate of Regis
Jesuit High School, will attend Harvard in the fall.

Dad, a forgery and our Model T Fords

Louise Bohmer Turnbull COLORADO VOICES Denver

Like other motorists caught in rush-hour traffic, I often long for
the still-crowded but less stressful commutes of 20 or 30 years
ago. I can barely imagine early 1900, when just 8,000 automobiles
were registered nationwide and there were only 150 miles of
unconnected paved roads. The others were rutted dirt one-laners
with potholes that, during the rainy season, could swallow a
vehicle whole. Cars were owned only by the wealthy, who could whiz
by the envious masses at a reckless 10 mph in Packards,
Oldsmobiles, Pierce Arrows, Locomobiles, Baker Electronics or
similar handcrafted motorcars.

The average workman, earning 22 cents an hour, had no hope of ever
owning his own vehicle. To save $4,000 would have taken him more
than 18,000 hours or 72 hours a week for almost five years.

In 1908, only eight years later, Ford’s assembly line for building
Model T’s changed everything. Henry’s Flivver or Tin Lizzie could
reach the breakneck speed of 40 mph and cost only $850. Eight years
later, because of mass production, the price had dropped to $350.
Ford’s workers earned the princely salary of $5 a day, so owning a
car was no longer an impossible dream: America’s love affair with
automobiles had begun.

In 1920, when I was 3, my middle-class family knew only one person
who owned a car, Frank John, a concert cellist who needed the
vehicle to lug his instrument to various jobs. Sometimes he would
invite my family to join him for a Sunday drive. I still remember
the excitement of sitting in the front seat and seeing the beauty
of thousands of wildflowers covering the hills near Colorado
Springs.

Three years later, we moved to Denver and again knew only one car
owner, Alfred Romander, a painter/paperhanger, who had a Ford
pickup to cart around his ladders and other supplies. Although we
took a streetcar to his house for an occasional dinner, Mr.
Romander always took us home in his truck with him, Mom and Dad
squooshed in the front seat and me lying down in the truck bed. It
was an exciting ride through the dark streets. I lay, looking up at
the stars and trying to guess where we were every time the truck
turned.

By 1928, cars were still a rarity in our Capitol Hill neighborhood,
but life was about to change. At the beginning of summer, Lakeside
Amusement Park had begun advertising its end-of-the-season raffle
prize: a new car. All summer long, whenever we went to the park,
Mom filled out the coupons and deposited them into a mammoth wire
cylinder. On Labor Day evening, we joined thousands of hopeful
patrons at the park for the drawing. The winner’s name was
announced: Oswald Kirchgarter, my chef dad’s assistant cook.

Soon after, my parents decided to use their savings to buy a car.
We went shopping on East Colfax at Sherman-
McCarty’s Ford/Mercury showroom, where Dad struck a deal with the
salesman, Mr. Hoffman (I can’t recall his first name), who also
promised to teach my father to drive. After several hour-long
sessions, and one solo drive, our very own tan Ford Model A joined
the family.

Three days later, we took our first long journey in the car, to
Rocky Mountain National Park. Dad didn’t become white- knuckled
until we started climbing the park’s narrow dirt road. As we rode
near the edge, I could see straight down into a deep chasm. And
then a downward- bound vehicle approached. Dad inched our car
several dozen feet backwards to a wide space, letting the other
auto pass. Despite a flat tire and the car’s overheating, we had a
wonderful day.

A few months later, after his usual 12- hour workday, Dad fell
asleep at the wheel and plowed into an embankment. He was unhurt,
but the uninsured car was totaled. Mom kept urging the purchase of
another car, this time on the installment plan. He refused,
reluctant to “borrow against the future.”

And then Mom had an idea. One afternoon after school, she put
several of Dad’s signatures and a white paper on the kitchen table.
She told me to practice copying his name until it satisfied her.
Then, carefully, I forged “Bruno Bohmer” at the bottom of his
life insurance policy. Later, when the check came, I again signed
his name. A few days later, Mr. Hoffman delivered an identical
Ford, parking it in the wood shed at the back of the house. When
Dad opened the shed’s door and saw Model A II, he began to cry –
and so did Mom, my sister and I.

Mom never learned to drive. I started when I was 42, drove for 42
years, and then quit, even though my children thought I was still
capable.

Nowadays, sitting in an Access-a-Ride van in bumper-to-bumper
traffic, I windowshop, choosing the car I’d like to buy. And then I
think of America’s population, rapidly nearing 300 million people
sharing more than 201 million automobiles, enduring endless
traffic, and paying exorbitant gas prices. I tell myself being
car-less is not so bad. Sometimes I almost believe me.

Louise Turnbull is a Denver native and retired teacher who has
written commercial film scripts and an animated TV special.

A choice before dying

Chuck Reyman Colorado Voices, Denver

An interesting footnote of American history is that Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. experienced a life-defining 24 hours while being treated
for severe wounds he suffered as a Union soldier during the Civil
War.

Convinced he was about to die, the young Holmes faced a profound
choice as he prepared to step into the void: profess faith in God
and thereby secure eternal salvation, as most do, or acknowledge
his own personal belief – that he didn’t have the faith God existed
and therefore couldn’t know what awaited beyond death’s door.

He decided on the latter – in his mind, the only honest way to die.
The decision made, he noted in his journal that he then closed his
eyes and waited for the end and the mysterious beyond.

As it turned out, Holmes recovered from his wounds and went on to
live a long and distinguished life as a jurist and man of letters.
But the decision he made at what he thought was the threshold of
his own death those many years before, the decision simply to step
into the void with no net, spiritually “uninsured” and untethered
to a belief in the prevailing orthodoxy of his time, strikes me as
a stunningly honest and courageous one.

Several years ago, my 94-year-old mother died of congestive heart
failure in a dreary nursing home. During her last months,
antidepressants had smoothed over the nasty spots in her demeanor.
An almost childlike sweetness and compliance now replaced the
anger, bitterness and cynicism that had overtaken her during her
last years.

A couple of days before she died, I asked a Catholic priest if he
would administer the last rites.

“Of course,” he said.

As he entered her room, my mother greeted him with outstretched
arms – a sincere gesture born of an earlier time in her life. “Oh,
monsignor,” she smiled.

“You’ve been promoted,” I said to him.

“Well, it’s about time,” he laughed. “Who do we have here?” He
didn’t ask for her denomination, or if she even had one. I
appreciated that.

“This is Aurelia Ruth Reyman,” I told him. And with that, a
brief, simple and moving ceremony began in a shabby pink room of
the nursing home just off of East Colfax.

Embedded in the many other things the priest said that morning, I
remember this: “Ever-loving and merciful God, welcome this good
woman home,” he said as he anointed my mother’s hands, eyes and
forehead.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling sweetly and adoringly through the
veil of her medicated awareness.

Since then, I’ve often wondered what she was thinking behind her
smile, her adoring eyes and the medications. She had been raised a
Catholic in a New Orleans orphanage, a strong faith she carried
with her through her adult life and passed on to her two children
in the form of a Catholic education and Mass every Sunday. During
the last two decades of her life, however, she had increasingly
lost interest in life and, perhaps most significantly, in her
faith. She expressed no interest in Mass. She no longer spoke of
God.

Where had it gone? Had it been supplanted by the anger and despair
that often accompany aging? And when it appeared again after so
many years, had it merely been waiting all along, just under the
surface of her consciousness, for the simple spark of a priest or
some other stimulus to reignite it? Did the medications play a
role? Or was it the hard reality of approaching death that had
reawakened it?

And what exactly was “it”? Faith restored? Faith as an insurance
policy – faith “just in case”?

Or, as I like to think, was she simply attuned to the importance of
the choice, the leap in the dark, as she faced the end?

In the years since then, I’ve come to realize that the answer to
these questions doesn’t matter. As with Holmes, and with all of us,
a confluence of factors – impending death, faith and the unknown –
will provide a context for the choice. For Holmes, the nature of
that choice would be a distinguishing one, a courageous one. But
whether we make it courageously, cynically, weakened or emboldened,
or because the vision of a priest rekindles something important
from long ago, the mere fact that the choice will be there for all
of us is a humbling thing, a gift, a distinguishing mark of our
shared humanity.

And that, indeed, matters.

Chuck Reyman (reyman. charles@tchden.org) is public relations
director for The Children’s Hospital in Denver.